On and on Wisconsin

Posted on February 22, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The stand-off in Madison continues:

Firefighters playing bagpipes lead labor's march

Activists organized by, or supporting, the state’s major labor unions continue to march in and around the State House.

Importantly, the firefighters, police officers, and other public safety employees, exempted from this harsh budget bill, have stood with the teachers, nurses, and social workers.  Some are camping out in front of the state house.  (In Madison in February, this is a serious commitment.)

The Tea Party opponents, who visited Madison and marched over the Presidents’ Day weekend, have mostly gone home–and to the internet.  Online, they’re talking about the great deals organized workers have.

I’ve seen comments like:  “June, July, and august off?  I’d take that.”   But would you take the 34 fourth graders for nine months leading up to that time off?

Governor Scott Walker is cultivating a national presence, arguing that sharp restrictions on labor’s capacity to organize are necessary to balance any kind of state budget.  Emphatically, he refuses to negotiate or compromise.

Fourteen Democratic state senators continue to hide out (and give interviews) in Illinois, denying the Republican majority the quorum it needs to vote on budget bills.  They emphasize their willingness to compromise on everything but the right to meaningful collective bargaining.

Governor Walker and the Republican Majority in the State Senate have resumed their legislative work, and have urged the Democratic minority to return to the State House to vote (and LOSE) on the budget bill.

The state senators remain out of state, cheered on by the demonstrators in Madison.

Who’s got leverage?  The quorum is preventing the Wisconsin State Senate from doing budget business.  (It has, however, passed a resolution commending the Green Bay Packers on their season.)

Governor Walker says that without a budget he will commence lay-offs to balance the budget.  He hopes that there are enough threats and incentives here to peel off the support of some Wisconsinites–and at least one Democratic Senator.

But it’s way bigger than Wisconsin now.  Indiana and Ohio are now considering similar bills restricting public employees’ unions.  Large business interests, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers (via Tea Party groups), supports the Republican governors, and has worked to mobilize opinion and activism against the unions.

Liberal activists have also responded.  Moveon.org is mobilizing nationally in support of the Wisconsin workers.

It’s not the whole world, but lots of people are watching.

In effect, there is every pressure on both the governor and the Wisconsin Democrats to continue the standoff.  Outside Madison, activists see this as an early battle in a much longer struggle about organized labor.  As the battle drags on, the stakes get higher and higher–and extend far beyond Wisconsin’s borders.

Watch the crowd.  Organized labor can only win with the support of people who use their services and aren’t in a union.  And in this case, a win would mean accepting large cuts in salaries and benefits.

It’s not Egypt here; there will be no helicopters on the State House lawn to evacuate defeated officials to a safer space.  “Regime change” of any kind is at least two years off, and things are unlikely to get any easier–for anyone.

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On Wisconsin: Class War and Coalitions

Posted on February 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Calling the mash-up in Madison, where the Tea Party meets organized labor, “class war,” was Mike Huckabee’s idea.  Huckabee deplored President Obama’s choice to weigh in, rather modestly, on the conflict in Wisconsin.  (Class war, apparently, is a large problem when the working class is on the attack.)

More important, the political fight didn’t start with the protests in Madison last week, nor will it end.  Governor Scott Walker was no political neophyte, and has spent much of his political career promoting austerity and attacking labor–regardless of the political or economic climate.  Critics have been quick to point out that he cut a series of business taxes as soon as he took office, and that the limits on collective bargaining would have no effect on the state’s fiscal situation.  He was reluctant to waste the crisis of the state budget when he could stretch that crisis to go after labor.

So, what’s going on?  The attack on collective bargaining was the straw that broke the camel’s back (odd metaphor for unrest in the mid-West when protest is everywhere in the Middle East) for organized labor in Wisconsin.  Organized labor deployed its serious organizing capacity to mobilize opposition to Governor Walker, while supporters repeatedly announced that they were willing to make all of the financial concessions Walker described.  (For Governor Walker, making such a deal would be wasting the crisis.)

When labor went into the streets and activated union networks, others with grievances joined in, including students opposed to higher tuition, and some people who appreciated the services they received from teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses, and clerks at the Division of Motor Vehicles.

To extend the political moment, fourteen Democrats in the state senate took off–apparently for Illinois.  They lacked the votes to defeat the Republican majority, but they could deny it a quorum.  Although this isn’t a common strategy, the Wisconsin Democrats were hardly the first.

[My favorite quorum filibuster story is about a group of Texas Democrats in the state senate who, in 1979, went into hiding in a garage in Austin, to prevent the legislature from moving the date for the presidential primary.  Calling themselves the Killer Bees, they drank, played cards, and watched soap operas for five days.]

For the Wisconsin senators in hiding, this was clearly an effort to give their allies time to get their case out and build support.   It prevents their opposition from moving forward.  It could lead to compromise and negotiation in the Senate, but the effects outside the State House are likely to be much greater.

Once the media were filled with reports of colorful protests of working people, their opponents fought back.  Americans for Prosperity, a key group in the Tea Party’s infrastructure (discussed here), founded and funded by the Koch brothers, took out web ads and started a site to support Governor Walker.  (Mother Jones reports that the Koch brothers were behind the attack on collective bargaining in the first place.)  AFP is using the crisis to build organization and mailing lists.

AFP also chartered buses to take Tea Partiers to Madison and stage a counter-protest, although their numbers were much smaller than those of Walker’s opponents.  Once both sides are represented in the streets, marching through Madison’s cold winter, the main story shifts in most outlets to one about a protest stalemate.  At this point, however, it’s pretty clear that Governor Walker is winning in the state house, and his opponents are winning the street.  (A professor at the University of Wisconsin has been participating in the protests and posting observations at scatterplot.)

Even as organized labor has continued to decline in America, there are still more unionized workers than, say, people who would be affected by a modest estate tax or a higher tax rate for people who earned over $250,000.

But neither plutocrats nor organized labor are terribly popular in America.  What happens next is all about which side is able to mobilize other constituencies.  Are parents concerned about the education of their children more likely to be sympathetic to their teachers or more outraged at the prospect of taxation?  The answer is going to shape politics in America for a long time.

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Americans Protest against Austerity Budgets

Posted on February 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Activists see parallel struggles

Activists in Wisconsin have commenced staging dramatic protests against newly elected governor, Scott Walker’s plans for harsh cuts in public spending.  We’re going to watch to see if such protests spread across the American states the way revolutionary movements have spread across the Middle East.   If state governments explicitly adopt policies that target state workers, their salaries and benefits, and services like public education, it’s  a pretty smart bet to expect protests to spread beyond the snowy hills of Madison.

Lowering taxes sounds great, as does spending on useful programs.  The Federal government has been able to do both of these things by running large annual deficits.  States don’t enjoy the same latitude and have to work hard and creatively to find ways to avoid tough choices.

With even a modest bailout from the federal government unlikely, forty-five states face large budget deficits (out of a total of 50 states!).  It probably seems worst in your own state, but it’s terrible everywhere.

Republican Scott Walker campaigned on a promise to cut that deficit, and won election rather handily last November.  He’s sought to deliver on his campaign promises by raising fees (like college tuition) and cutting spending.  He’s directly targeted organized labor, promoting cuts in pensions and benefits, as well as salaries.  He’s also working to limit collective bargaining rights.

Protest at the state house

It’s not surprising that organized labor is fighting back.  The AFL-CIO joined other organizations in staging a demonstration at the State Capitol, which drew an estimated 30,000 people, including all sorts of public workers: teachers, firefighters, and police officers.  Students protesting tuition hikes have also joined in–and staged their own protests as well.  It’s not so surprising that people who are threatened react by protesting, nor is it surprising that their organizations are investing in their activism.  Forty-six percent of the voters don’t win elections, but they can do much much more in other ways.

What will be more significant–if/when it happens–is when the citizens who benefit from services–join in the effort.  Thus far, Governor Walker has been steadfast in his campaign to reduce the state–and particularly, to reduce the power of organized labor.  This isn’t so different from what he promised as a candidate, but it’s surely different from what some of his voters expected.  In Wisconsin, this is an early round of what will certainly be a battle that will occupy most of the next year.

And it’s not just Wisconsin.  In New Jersey, Republican Governor Chris Christie has embarked on a similar program, with a particular focus on public education, proposing the elimination of teacher tenure. Of course, organized teachers are trying to promote a broad campaign against his budget plans in general–and protect tenure in particular.  (Here’s a facebook page.)  When virtually everyone suggests that the prime answer to America’s educational deficit is improving teacher quality, cutting pensions and protections isn’t the obvious way to achieve this goal.

There are other approaches.  The new governor in Illinois, Pat Quinn, a Democrat, signed a large tax hike, and promises budget cuts at the same time.  This is likely to provoke everyone. Connecticut Governor, Dannel Malloy, has promised to protect pensions and collective bargaining, finding alternatives to cut spending (criminal justice reform), and finding alternative revenues.  The New York Times quotes Malloy:

Connecticut would not be Connecticut if we cut $3.5 billion out of the budget. We are a strong, generous, hopeful people. We’d be taking $800 million out of education. You can’t do that in this state. You’d have to gouge the Medicaid system. You’d have to close 25 percent of the nursing homes. What do you do with people?

In facing budget problems, states can target weak constituencies a) (e.g., Medicaid recipients), b) everyone (taxes), and/or c) strong constituencies (organized labor).  Historically, a governor could make a or b work.  Right now, however, it looks like most states will be going after all of them–and then responding to the protests they provoke.  What seemed politically viable in campaign rhetoric may not turn out to work in real life.  And we need to remember that elections punctuate political battles, they don’t generally end them.

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Irvine 11 news goes national

Posted on February 14, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The Orange County DA’s decision to pursue criminal charges against the Irvine 11 continues to pay off for their cause.  The controversy around the criminal charges has percolated all the way from Irvine (my home), a suburban community of about 300,000 people, to the New York Times–and elsewhere.

[We’ve discussed the details of the event here and here.]

The story recounts the history of activism around Israel on the UCI campus–which is, in my view, not a particularly activist campus.  It reports on the broad support the indicted students have received from an organized faculty group and the American Civil Liberties Union.   It also emphasizes the tension between the Muslim Students Union and Jewish groups which, it suggests, sometimes spills over to the campus as a whole.  And the Times reports that Israeli officials speaking in the United States have sometimes faced similar disruptions–but disrupters haven’t previously faced criminal charges.

While OCDA Tony Rackaukas means to set some kind of example, his prosecution will wind up encouraging exactly the kind of action he means to shut down.

After the failed shout-down, protesters’ cause was overshadowed by their actions, and even the attention to the demonstration had begun to die down.

Criminal charges, however, have revived the event, opened a space in mass media for the defendants–and their supporters–to give their views on what’s really going on–in the criminal case and in the Middle East.  And, according to the Times report, heightened Muslim/Jewish tensions on campus (I haven’t seen this up close).

The Orange County DA, far from discouraging disrupting and uncivil behavior, has demonstrated that such actions can win you and your cause national attention, as well as the sympathy and support of bystanders who might not agree with you.

How smart is this?

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McTerror: Finnish activists behead a plastic icon.

Posted on February 12, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The Food Liberation Army, a new activist group in Finland, took a statue of Ronald McDonald hostage, demanding that the McDonald’s corporation answer a series of questions about how they produce and serve their food.   The online demand, a kind of ransom note, starts:

We love burgers, fries and McDonald’s, but we can no longer watch silent when the food we love is being destroyed and brought to shame because of greed and indifference. Because of your short-sightedness your burgers have become nearly inedible.

That is why we want to help McDonald’s to save food. We made you a list of questions we want you to answer. We hope that your answers will make you understand the dilapidation of the food culture we love and the appropriate measures.

When McDonald’s refused to engage with them, they executed the plastic statue by guillotine. You can see some satirical videos on their website.

The Mckidnapping is the first action by the group, but the website expresses very broad aims:

As citizens we have lost faith in the political system and its values; politicians who are allowed to do anything and still remain in power. As consumers, we are tired of making a difference by our purchasing decisions, as well as faceless companies whose only value is money. We want our lives back.

We gathered a group of people who think alike.
And Food Liberation Army was born
It has a simple task:
To liberate man from systems bigger than him or her.
Fight the power where the power does not belong.
Return decisions on our own lives back to us.
To move from words to deeds.

Satire can be powerful.  Activists stage events to get attention for themselves and their causes, to bring their ideas to the larger public, and to activate people who might agree with them.  And McDonald’s, big, rich, and everywhere, is an obvious target. But how does satire work?

Morgan Spurlock’s film, Supersize Me, covered the nutritional issues of fast food in an entertaining, polemical, and disgusting way in 2004.

McDonald’s responded by issuing a series of statements that explained that their sandwiches could be part of a healthy diet, as long as you didn’t eat them every day.  They eliminated the supersizing pricing promotion (more food for not much more money), emphasizing that they’d been planning to do so anyway.  (We should always be suspicious when the targets of activism repeatedly emphasize that they are not responding to it, particularly when they change policies.)  And they put up a very informative website which allows anyone to calculate the nutritional value of a Mcmeal online.

The Food Liberation Army is talking about nutrition, but also fair labor practices and sustainable agriculture.

I’m loving it.

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Egyptian revolution: Who won what?

Posted on February 11, 2011 by David S. Meyer

It looks like President Hosni Mubarak has acquiesced to domestic and international pressure in leaving office after thirty years.  Even so, there were a number of stutter steps over the past few days.

The colorful, dramatic, and diverse demonstrations in Tahrir Square are definitely the most interesting visuals coming out of Egypt.  We want to cheer for people power and hope for some kind of democratic outcome–that still maintains a relatively stable role in international politics.  But what’s most visible isn’t always the whole of what’s important.

We can see the people pressure on President Mubarak, and we’re likely to see these pictures for a very long time.   But that’s only one component of domestic pressure.  It’s very clear that Mubarak also lost the support of (at least some significant segments of) the military and the Egyptian political elite, but we don’t know what kinds of threats and incentives were bandied about in discussions leading up to the moment of his departure.  It’s also very clear that Mubarak was in contact with leaders of other countries, including the United States, but we have only slight inklings of what kinds of pressures and inducements he faced, nor how they changed as the revolution developed.  This doesn’t mean they weren’t very important–and they are likely to be extremely important in shaping what happens next.

So, in the last few days a vast range of interests inside and outside of Egypt could agree that getting rid of Mubarak was a necessary first step in achieving their larger goals.  For all of them, this is a moment of triumph and celebration.

What happens next, however, is about the battles over next steps that will certainly emerge.  For the United States, for example, stability has virtually always trumped democracy in foreign policy.  Helping Mubarak leave office can be seen as a way to prevent broader and more destabilizing changes in the future.  In Egypt, it’s hard to think that the advocates of democracy will agree with the military on much of what will happen next.

The point: Mubarak united a very large coalition in opposition.  When he leaves, the critical glue that held that coalition together disappears, and the whole range of activists and interests will find new opponents–and maybe enemies–among their recent allies.

Right now, we have one clear loser, Hosni Mubarak, but just who the ultimate winners will be–and what Egypt will ultimately look like–is pretty much unknown.

In the next round of political battles, which has surely already commenced, there will be winners and losers–and who falls into each camp will matter.

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DA’s indictment gives Irvine 11 another chance

Posted on February 10, 2011 by David S. Meyer

What was Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas thinking?  Pressing criminal charges against the students who disrupted an invited talk by Israel ambassador Michael Oren gives them a political opportunity that they were completely unable to create for themselves.

Recall that the Irvine 11 (as we’ve discussed) staged a “popcorn” protest during Ambassador Oren’s talk, as one student after another stood and yelled at predetermined intervals, before being escorted out.  The students faced discipline from the University of California, Irvine (details of which are not public), and the Muslim Student Union was temporarily banned from recognition as an official organization.

The DA’s public pondering and then pursuit of criminal charges has, predictably, opened a large window for debate through which many people have jumped:

A group of 100 UCI faculty signed a letter urging the DA to drop the charges, arguing that further prosecution will do more harm than good to dialogue and civility on campus–and elsewhere.  Organizers gathered signatures hastily through odd email networks; I’m sure many more faculty would like to have signed.  (You’ll find my name among the list of signatories.)

Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal activist group based in San Francisco, says the charges are racist.  They report that they have staged identical protests against Israeli officials and not faced criminal prosecution.  According to Rachel Roberts, a Southern California member of the group:

We did exactly what the Irvine kids did. We criticized Israeli policy…We did it as part of like a popcorn action with one person disrupting, then another person disrupting to emphasize our outrage and we were escorted out. And then nothing happened.

Of course, groups have weighed in on the other side as well.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center supports the OCDA’s office, and posted a very friendly interview with Rackaukas on its website.

Expect more groups to weigh in on both sides as this case develops.

And local activists have started a new group, Stand with the Irvine 11, with the express goal of supporting the students.  Expect petitions, protests, public education, and–if a trial actually takes place–fund raising.

The first thing to remember is that the initial protest was incredibly unsuccessful.  Ambassador Oren gave his speech; all the media coverage emphasized the rudeness of the protesters, not their political concerns–or even the content of Oren’s talk.  Assume that the protesters made their own sense of the event as they faced sanctions against themselves and their group.  While some surely were fortified in their convictions, others turned their attention to other issues, including their educations.

District Attorney Rackaukas’s prosecution flattened out their individual concerns and turned them into a group, the Irvine 11.  Supporters and opponents have rallied around, turning them into heroic martyrs or intolerant thugs.  And people with very different views about Israel/Palestine have rallied around their cause;  in political rhetoric, they have become the victims, rather than the violators, of intolerance of free speech.  The individuals can’t now escape the cause.

And if DA Rackaukas allows the case to come to trial, the defendants will have a chance to project their political views to a broader audience.  Certainly, they will prepare some version of a “necessity defense,” focusing on the greater harms they see Israel committing.  I don’t expect an Orange County judge to allow such a defense in Court, but I’m confident that the defendants will find an outlet in the media coverage of the trial.

In effect, the students will get more coverage for their views by virtue of being criminal defendants than they did as disruptive activists.

If DA Rackaukas thinks this through, I expect he’ll want to negotiate plea bargains quickly to make the issue go away.  But if he had thought it through, he probably wouldn’t have charged the students in the first place.

Repression doesn’t always work the way those who use it expect.   I believe the sage, Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

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Charging the Irvine 11

Posted on February 5, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Students demonstrate against charging the Irvine 11

It’s astonishing to learn that the Orange County District Attorney’s office opted to charge 11 young people with “conspiring to disrupt a meeting” (LA Times Report here).  In filing the charges, the DA is resurrecting a failed event and giving many people a cause to rally around–including people, like me, who did not support the initial protest.

It’s not that the students didn’t plan to disrupt a speech given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine (my school) last year.  It seems very clear that a group within the Muslim Students Union planned to attend Oren’s speech and, one at a time, interrupt the speaker by trying to shout him down.  You can find numerous clips of the event on youtube (here’s one), mostly posted by people who were offended by the action.

One after another, each disrupter was escorted from the room, and Oren ultimately delivered his speech.  I think the action overshadowed the demonstrators’ cause, and in no way advanced any kind of understanding of politics in the Middle East.  The sporadic shouts took attention off Israel and kept it firmly on the UCI campus.

It was very much like the Tea Party shout-downs at town meetings on health care the previous summer, but the Muslim students didn’t have large media outlets weighing in to portray their rudeness as understandable frustration.  Either way, it’s an awful model for democratic change.

Publicity was widespread.  I was at a conference far away when the event took place, but a relative emailed me a youtube link, asking what would happen to the students.  I hoped that the University would make it clear to the disruptive students that such conduct was unacceptable on a college campus, and that whatever sanction conveyed this message be mild enough so as not to disrupt the students’ education or careers.  (My colleague, Erwin Chemerinsky, figured all this out much faster and made the argument I was stumbling toward in an op-ed at the LA Times.)

Whatever sanctions were meted out to individual students are confidential, but the Muslim Students Union, which was found to have coordinated the event, was temporarily banned from campus.

I was involved on the periphery of the event.  I am currently Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy here, one of the groups that cosponsored Ambassador Oren’s visit.  I drafted a letter of apology on behalf of the Center, published on the Center’s website, which stated:

We apologize that the tempest at the event temporarily overshadowed the much more important issues that your talk addressed. As scholars concerned with democracy, we believe it is critical to question—and listen to—people with whom you have even the most substantial differences.  Sitting down and talking with opponents is always preferable to trying to silence them.

I’ll stand by this, and wish that the governments in the Middle East, including Israel, would as well.

As an event, the protest at the Oren speech was, uh, sophomoric and counterproductive.  The actions overshadowed the issues.  By shifting discussion from occupation and settlements in Israel and Palestine to the lack of civility in Irvine, the activists lost the battle.  Very little of the massive coverage addressed what they really cared about.  But stupid and boorish isn’t necessarily criminal.

In taking on this prosecution, the Orange County DA has given the students attention as a collective, generating sympathy for them in the process.  Protecting the campus as a site for open speech means making allowances for mistakes and overstatements, and finding ways to bring people back into the dialogue.  Criminal prosecution, fines, and time in jail don’t do this.  And every weekend on college campuses across the country students make worse–and potentially more damaging– mistakes without even a wisp of a political motive–or lesson.

OCDA Tony Rackauckas should rethink how he wants to use the strained resources of his office, the Courts, and the prison system.  While the university’s discipline gave each individual student the chance to rethink his conduct, the DA has turned them collectively into a symbol, the Irvine 11, a cause for others to rally around.  He should be reluctant to turn student activists into martyrs for free speech.

And where is UCI on all of this?  Well, the interim director of communications at UCI has issued a statement explaining that the University thought it was done with the issue, and this is all the initiative of the OCDA.

The District Attorney’s announcement reflects action independent of the University. He has subpoena power and access to information that we do not. From our perspective we thoroughly and fairly investigated and adjudicated the matter last year. Conduct violations were addressed fully, consistent with the guidelines of the Student Code of Conduct.

Since the university’s resolution of this matter in the summer of 2010, our campus community continues to build bridges of understanding and foundations for respectful and meaningful dialogue.

How’s that for tepid?  If the DA has additional information that merits such a charge, he hasn’t yet shared it with the public.

It’s time for a statement from our Chancellor.  I do not understand why he would let the opportunity to take a moral position for tolerance and civil discourse pass by.

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Rosa Parks’s Birthday

Posted on February 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks!  Born on February 4, 1913, Parks was not a tired old lady in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of the bus.  She was an experienced and committed activist, deeply tied into the civil rights activist networks.  She wasn’t the only one who took a risk to challenge segregation laws in the South, but that hardly makes her less heroic.

Activism in the civil rights movement was hardly a career move for Rosa Parks; her  recognition as an American hero came eventually.  In 1996 President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Follow the money: find it first.

Posted on February 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Nearly 1,000 activists marched in Rancho Mirage, California this week, protesting outside an invitation-only strategy meeting of leading conservatives inside and outside government.  The demonstration, organized by labor and environmental activists, targeted the meeting’s hosts, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

For the better part of the past few decades, the Kochs have put serious money into funding the ideas and activities of the conservative movement, sponsoring think tanks, like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and activist groups, including Citizens for a Sound Economy and Americans for Prosperity–and many others.  The Kochs have put their money in support of their ideals (low taxes, limited government, minimal regulation) and their interests: they control the second largest privately held company in the United States, which holds several large energy companies.  Unsurprisingly, they’ve been particularly aggressive in attacking any effort to respond to climate change with regulation, activism, or taxation.  The Kochs have, over a long period of time, built the intellectual and organizational infrastructure of much of what became the Tea Party.  [Jane Mayer’s portrait of the Kochs, published last summer in the New Yorker, is an indispensable source on their political efforts.]

The protesters mean to expose the influence of big money in American politics.  And, to some degree, their effort worked.  Their demonstration, punctuated by the arrest of 25 protesters, brought more attention to the Kochs and their political efforts–exactly the visibility the brothers have worked hard to avoid.  But some serious money clearly went into opposing the Kochs.  Although I haven’t priced them recently, I don’t think blimps come cheap.

Conservative critics respond, what could be more American than investing in the politics of your ideas?  And they charge anti-Koch activists with a double standard, reflexively pointing to George Soros, the billionaire currency speculator who has put a great deal of money into causes he supports, many of them on the left of the political spectrum.

Reflexive charges of symmetry, accurate or not, are a staple of contested politics, going back, at least, to the school yard (no, you have cooties) and the back seat of the car (he hit me first).  But at least two differences between the billionaire activist funders are worth noting.  First, the Kochs’ ideology aligns very well with their business interests.  Disparaging climate change science and opposing environmental regulation, for example, is a good business strategy–at least for the short term, for companies invested in the oil industry.  I haven’t seen any reports about Soros’s politics working in the service of his business: currency speculation.

Second, Soros has hardly been a shrinking violet about publicity.  The groups he funds, including the Open Society Foundations, use his name and the websites often display his picture.  Soros lectures on his ideas frequently, sits for interviews with reporters, and has published several books detailing his ideas.

In contrast, while the Kochs are not shy about taking credit for their philanthropic contributions to museums or the arts (for example, at the Smithsonian), they’ve tried to keep their political efforts, their ideas, and their interests, out of the public eye.  (Take a look at Americans for Prosperity‘s website and see if you can find Koch brothers’ support.  I couldn’t.  Perhaps they fear that some people would be less likely to buy Bounty towels if they knew their political provenance?)

In the short term, at least, getting mass media reports on Koch politics is a victory for the activities.  But last year’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee (2010), makes it harder to follow the money trail.

Meanwhile, according to Kenneth Vogel at Politico, the Kochs are coming to terms with inevitable visibility, hiring public relations experts to shape their public profile, and filing lawsuits against activists who tried to use satire, in the form of fake press releases, to draw attention to Koch Industries’ environmental policies.

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